Posts Tagged Under: Intel

What is the best high-end CPU? The 3 best consumer-grade options are the Broadwell-Ei7-6900K and i7-6950X, and the older Haswell-E i7-5960X. We previously recommended the i7-5960X over the newer i7-6900K in our build guide for NVIDIA’s GTX 1080, because of the older CPU’s superior overclocking potential. Here we will compare the pros and cons of these CPUs in more detail, so that you can make the best choice.

New PC hardware releases (and falling prices on older hardware) have caused a lot of small updates to our PC parts recommendations. This update focuses on improving our recommendations in the mid-range tiers. There are a lot of small updates, so let us take them category by category.

We recently posted a new video on our YouTube channel about CPUs and how to find a good one. It’s the first video in a series explaining the various components of a PC. The goal is to give people a slightly deeper understanding of each component, and give some practical advice on how to pick out the right components for you.

Intel’s latest CPU family, Skylake, has just launched with two new CPUs (the i5-6600K and i7-6700K), a new socket (1151), and a new chipset family for motherboard (Z170). These CPUs are on the 14nm manufacturing process, which is not strictly new (their previous generation, Broadwell, was on 14nm dies), but new when it comes to mass-market availability.

How well do these new CPUs perform? After analyzing reviews (linked below), it looks as though, unfortunately, Intel has decided to forgo CPU improvements and focus on the integrated GPU.

Intel’s latest enthusiast platform, the Haswell-E CPU family, has just been launched. There are three CPUs available: two 6-cores and one 8-core. We will not be getting into the details, as you can read more about Haswell-E over at Anand’s or Tom’s. One thing that you do need to note is that you will need to buy an X99 motherboard and DDR4 ram if you want to use the Haswell-E platform.

Haswell’s launch is a little disappointing, even though it does bring a small improvement to performance. When it comes to CPUs, we are a greedy lot, but Intel made us that way. When Intel launched Nehalem (the first gen i7), the performance improvement over its predecessor was roughly 20%-30%.

This was repeated with Sandy Bridge (second gen), which brought an improvement of roughly 25%. Ivy Bridge (third gen) did not maintain the pace, offering only a small ~5% improvement, but we forgave that, since it was just a die-shrink. Haswell was supposed to bring back the excellent OC-ability of SB, and also bring excellent improvements to performance as well as power consumption.

Haswell is Intel’s latest CPU offering, based on the same 22nm process as Ivy Bridge, but with an improved architecture for better performance. It is supposed to be ready in just a couple of months, and rumour has it that it is already shipping to OEMs.

i7-3770K vs i7-3820

The 7970 is bigger than the 7870, and it is better. 8GB of RAM is bigger than 1GB, and it is better. Naturally, one would expect the i7-3820 to perform better than the i7-3770K, since it is also has a bigger number. Let us take a closer look.